Violent Media Poisoning Nation's Soul
..Obviously, the overriding issue is that we have a gun problem in the United States and a political climate that has been, at least until now, too timid to do anything about it.But we also have a culture problem, and we know this. We know, because though Newtown shocked us and stopped us in our tracks and continues to haunt our imaginations, it did not surprise us. If the Newtown killings were an act of terrorism, the whole country would be mobilized to protect itself from the Other. But this felt like something from within, not just from within our borders, but from within the soul of the nation. And in talking about matters of the soul, our cultural gatekeepers have been just as timid as our politicians.
Fourteen years ago, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, in "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill," were warning us about the effects of violent video games and movies on young and impressionable minds. They compared the games that kids play to the conditioning that soldiers and Marines get in order to desensitize them to killing. They pointed out that by the time children reach adulthood they have witnessed hundreds of thousands of simulated violent deaths and have come to associate witnessing death and mayhem with pleasure. That same book contained an introduction by then-President Bill Clinton, pleading with filmmakers and game makers to self-censor in the interest of children. That plea went unheeded, if it was noticed at all.
The interaction between real-life and movies is complicated. Some will claim that movies influence behavior, even as producers will invariably insist that movies only reflect society, as though movies were some unobtrusive aspect of culture, unnoticed by the world. The truth is that movies and society influence each other in ways that overlap and are therefore arguable. But clearly something seems to be going on, and something is in need of changing. My own epiphany came about six months ago and was occasioned by the film "The Dark Knight Rises." When I saw it at an advance screening, I regarded it as a wallow in nonstop cruelty and destruction, a film that was anti-life. But when I wrote the review, I said none of those things, which I considered to be too subjective and personal, and instead concentrated on objective aspects of the movie that I deemed deficient, and I gave it a middling-to-negative review.
Then came the events in that movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and suddenly my own writing about this film seemed to me limp and inadequate - no, flat-out pathetic. It's not that "The Dark Knight Rises" directly caused a maniac to start killing people in a movie theater; obviously, it didn't. But it did seem to me that the soul-crushing chaos of the film - ultimately reflected in what happened in Aurora - warranted a response that it never got. Survivors of the Aurora tragedy mentioned that, at first, they thought the gunman was part of the movie's promotion. That says something about the nature of our cinema, and it also invites us to consider what if that were true. Imagine Aurora never happened, but instead a summer movie contained a scene of a gunman going into a movie theater and slaughtering people. What would be the public and the critical response to that?.. Read more:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/15372-violent-media-poisoning-nations-soul
